Blog archives

2013 was a roller coaster of a year for me. A roller coaster with some serious business highs, lows, and hardly anything in between. A few of the key happenings were... went to a presidential inauguration and some inaugural balls! ... read more

One day last year, amidst the shitstorm of a job and life I was living in the city of Chicago, I IM'd my buddy, Josh and told him that I needed another trip to the Boundary Waters. I wanted to check out from technology, humans, the city, insanity, everything. A trip to the Boundary Waters, a complete wilderness area absent of all civilization, modern conveniences, and man made structure seemed like exactly what I needed. This is a place where canoes and feet are the only modes of transportation, paper topographic maps are the only way to navigate, and you only take what you can carry. There are no cell phone towers, electricity, roads, running water, man made structure, and minimal human contact... read more

Didn't have the best lineup ever, but it was definitely better than 2012… Add in not having a crazy job to pull me back to the office, a free place to stay, the beautiful weather, and the amount of butts hanging out of daisy duke mom jorts, this turned out to be one of the best lollapalooza experiences so far. Here's how it went... Friday Crystal Castles - This was my 3rd time seeing them. Their producer, Ethan is amazing and Alice is batshit crazy on stage… smoking, drinking jameson out of the bottle, and just putting on a great show. They sounded awesome... read more

I've been trying to take a lot of random bike adventures around central Iowa this summer… and the more I bike, the more I'm coming to realize that biking in Iowa is both amazing and confusing as shit. Where should I be? One of my biggest concerns about biking here is that there isn't a clear definition of where bikers are supposed to be. If you ride your bike in any urban setting, you know (or learn fast) that bicycles belong on the street. Bicyclists "Share the road" or "GTFO the sidewalk" (depending on whether you're learning from a sign or a pissed off pedestrian)... read more

It's no secret that I fell in love with public transit while I spent those 15 months in Chicago. So last night, when Iowa Senator Janet Petersen scheduled a meeting with me in downtown Des Moines, I decided to leave my truck in the garage and finally try out our public transit system. Here's how it went. Step 1, get directions I looked up transit directions to my meeting via google maps (like ya do) and was instantly shut down. "Public transit coverage may not be available in this area." Step 1, get directions (take 2) I visited ridedart.com hoping for a place to put in some addresses or plan a route map, but I couldn't find one... read more

The year that I… brought in at Chicago house parties with Kari, Drea, and friends. mostly spent living in Chicago, apart from my wife and working my ass off. learned to scratch records (sort of). watched my uncle get inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. met the President of the United States... read more

I moved to Chicago for 466 days, where I lived in 3 different neighborhoods and visited 375 different places — 239 of which were restaurants or bars. I walked around 10,087 steps (or 7.67 miles) per day, slept roughly 7.19 hours per night, and gained 1 pound before returning to Iowa. I was actually in the city on 400 of those days and ventured out of Chicago on 117 of them. 68 of those (spread across 17 different trips) were spent in my actual home, with my wife in Iowa. I was also fortunate enough to get out to Washington DC, San Francisco, Arizona, and Napa Valley... read more

A few weeks ago … err actually I guess it was more like 2 months ago (the concept of time has completely broken since I've taken on this crazy job of mine), I decided to try a little experiment in gluten free eating. First let me start off with the gross backstory… For years, I've been prescribed with various medications to make this random rash on my ankles go away. Doctors have told me it's eczema, a fungus, and several other random types of dermatitis. Some of the treatments have helped, but nothing has really made it go away. So I've pretty much just lived with it - as annoying as it may be... read more

I'll start off by saying that the weirdest part about lollapalooza this year was the line-up. I wasn't really stoked about ANY of the headliners and kinda "meh" about most of the other shows. This has never really happened to me on any other year. However, I'm living in Chicago right now and couldn't pass up the ease of going to the festival. Here's how things went... read more

I'm 30 years old, love music, and am about to become the sickest DJ my bedroom has ever seen. But first, let me give you a a bit of a backstory... In the late 90s (high school, for me) I found house music. I had mostly been listening to terrible metal and rap at the time… but once I heard those crazy electro sounds, I started to become super interested. I even started going to some under-18 dance clubs in the Quad Cities... read more

Once I got to work, things were fairly normal - well aside from most everyone else being dressed to the nines… especially the ladies. But then around lunch time, about 30 giant secret service dudes started showing up along with cops, dogs, etc. We had a mandatory office leave while they swept the entire place. (Remember, this is Obama's campaign headquarters. These are the people who love the president and are hired to re-elect him... read more

After my shower this morning I thought to myself, "What should I wear to make myself presentable to the President of the United States?" I don't really like dressing up and I wasn't about to start… but I felt like I should at least make an attempt. My normal attire consists of a hat, a pair of skate shoes, an unwashed pair of jeans, and an inappropriate/inappropriately priced screenprinted tee. To me, the only real variables of this outfit were my hat and shirt. So I glanced at my 2 stacks of t-shirts and thought, "I probably shouldn't wear a screen printed shirt... Maybe I should throw on one of my 'fancy' flannel button ups." After looking through those for a bit I remembered that I worked in a 76 degree office and that everyone in the workplace would be packed as close to the president as possible... read more

Ah, 2011. A year that was brought in while wearing tie dye tighty whities at a house party in Des Moines, and finished at a freshly painted warehouse party in Chicago. It was quite a roller coaster year with my new job, huge culture shifts, and a long distance relationship with that amazing wife of mine. There's sooo much to talk about, but I'm gonna try to keep this short and list style. So, other than my new job and the move to Chicago... read more

The 20 year anniversary of Lollapalooza, my 5th year at the festival, the 30th anniversary of my life, and the turning point of a pretty major change in my (and Kari's) life. We had some huge milestones going on this year... all of which sort of overshadowed each other, and moved too fast for me to fully appreciate them like I should have. Either way, Lollapalooza was a giant, super expensive blast again this year. There's the standard eating of great foods, dealing with crowds, late night dinners and even later night partying, so I won't get into all that… but here's a breakdown of the shows we saw this year... read more

So my buddy, Harper is currently serving as the CTO for the 2012 Obama Campaign. This spring, he told me I should interview to join his team. However, after taking the 5 hour commute and a couple other minor details into consideration, I declined. … and regretted it immediately. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, working on technology for our president with a team of baller engineers... read more

Let me start off by saying, I don't care about diets and dieting (I think most diets sound completely awful and unhealthy). However, I do care about being healthy, so I thought I'd share a bit about how I lost 20 pounds over the span of a few months. The extremely short version is that I stopped eating like a dickhead. And all that really means is that I began snacking less and started paying attention to my food portions. That's it... read more

This is one of the best, most condescending emails that's ever been written about me. Back in my corporate days (circa 2007), a director sent this to all of information management. Subject: Sorry to have to write this... Importance: High Folks, I'm confident that it's no one in our group - given your maturity and professionalism, but you can help me by spreading the word that the reoccurring stupid and immature prank of taking, or tearing, a "bite" from Friday donuts (and other food) and putting the remainder back into the box is a thing of the past, starting now. If you see anyone doing this in the future, please politely ask them to take the whole thing and not replace the remnant. Please also politely inform them that if I ever see someone biting, or tearing food to resemble a bite, and replacing the remainder, it will be a very bad day for that person... read more

So a couple weeks ago I put together a timeline of my 2010 with plans of writing a year end blog... so now that you've forgotten about everyone else's 2010 retrospectives, here's 1 more. Every time I write these I start out thinking, "man, I didn't really do a whole lot last year," but after looking back through photos, blogs, and tweets... I'm quite happy with last year. I traveled a lot, saw a lot, became a bit healthier, and progressed professionally... read more

And now for a story about Josh and I geolocating a random YouTube video - and how I'm amazed by how easy it was. So, this all starts with a conversation with my dad over the recent snowfall we've been having... He tells me about this Toro Power Shovel thing, which sorta looks like a vacuum sized, cheap snowblower. My dad said that he was super skeptical of this power shovel, but he tried it out and wound up being thoroughly impressed. Soon after, I passed this info onto my buddy, Josh... read more

So I guess I should blog about Kari and I's amazing 5 year anniversary trip to Ireland... Starting off with travel... the flights weren't that bad at all. I mean, they were 6-7 hours, but having my ipad and an exit row seat made everything much nicer. If you're ever going on a flight this long, try to get an exit row seat (but beware - exit row window seats do not recline all the way)... read more